While the recent FIFA World Cup may have drowned—or distanced—the Premier League that ended in May, Sankar Chatterjee still feels chuffed at the mention of English club football. His favourite team Arsenal won the title this year after a gap of 22 years, and later came close to winning the Champions League as well, which would have made them European club champions.
The near-miss (a defeat in the final to Paris Saint-Germain on penalties) does not bother him much; it’s the title that brings out the biggest smile from the chief executive officer of Decathlon Sports India, a role he has had for two years now. “We at least brought them till the penalties,” he says, “because PSG is very, very strong.”
While Chatterjee may be a relatively new CEO, he is a company veteran, a rare professional in this day and age to have spent a decade and a half—almost his entire career—in one firm. He credits that to Decathlon’s culture of encouraging a “zig-zag” career path, which allowed him to work through various leadership roles since 2011.
The Decathlon story
At the Artisan Bar and Lounge in Mumbai’s Sofitel hotel, the 45-year-old nurses a tea while munching on an occasional cookie on a Friday afternoon. He is in a Decathlon T-shirt and their 500-series running shoes, which makes sense for someone who will be on the move the whole day. He has to head to their store in Malad post this meeting, then a team dinner before taking a late evening flight back to Bengaluru, where he lives and where the company is headquartered.
It’s not often that Chatterjee spends a Friday evening away from home and family, wife and a seven-and-a-half-year-old son, but that’s how the cards stacked up this week. His schedule, managed by a team member, is planned a year in advance, with some wriggle room left for a sudden call-up from ministries and governmental departments. He travels every week, once to one city in India or maybe three times in a month. “Normally, the efficiency of my calendar goes a little more than 85%, which is not bad,” he says.
Decathlon India is a ₹5,000-crore turnover business, employing about 5,400 people, operating out of over 50 cities and 132 stores in the country. India is a hub for the company’s sourcing—about 9% of their global sourcing, worth roughly around €450 million, happens from here. Around 11-12% of their total revenue comes from online purchases, delivering to 21,000 pin codes pan India. Eighteen per cent is from out-stores (like Blinkit, Myntra, etc.) and 82% from in store.
Around 60% of the company’s sales are products that are made in India. The target, he says, is to increase that figure to around 75-80% by 2030, which is also one of his professional goals. He gives the example of silicone swimming caps, which he once thought could not be manufactured in India, but are today made in factories in Maharashtra. Almost 98% of their bicycles are made in India, he adds as a way of another example.
In the years Chatterjee has spent in the company, he is credited with the Decathlon Connect stores—smaller, tech-enabled urban formats—and the integration of Decathlon with quick commerce.
“I am a big believer in creating a pipeline,” says Chatterjee, mentioning the company mantra of the three Ps: people, planet and profit. “If you ask me, are you an expert in logistics or digital? I say I am an expert on people. I groom people but simultaneously learn digital, logistics, supply chain and retail business.”
A CEO’s journey
Chatterjee grew up in a small town near Durgapur in Bengal, the son of a chemistry teacher father, and moved out for a bachelor’s degree at the Textile and Engineering Institute in Ichalkaranji in Maharashtra. A few years’ work followed with a Silk Board project in Delhi before a master’s programme at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in the Capital.
His main interest after engineering college, which gave him knowledge of textile components, fabric and yarn, was to get into production. But NIFT developed his interest in the apparel business, and led to a job in 2010 with Inditex, the group that houses brands like Zara and Bershka, among others.
The job in the National Capital Region took him to factories in Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh, to the company headquarters in La Coruna, Spain, before he moved to Decathlon a year later in Delhi. That was the first—and last—time he switched jobs.
The sports apparel and accessories company, started 50 years ago in France, seemed like a natural fit for the football-loving Bengali, as it combined his interests in sport with clothing. Over the years, since 2011 when he first joined the company, Chatterjee has hopped across many departments, including supply chain, transport, logistics and digital. He started in Gurugram-Delhi before moving to Bengaluru in under two years.
At the time, Decathlon, which is today recognisable for its large-format stores, had one outlet on Sarjapur Road in Bengaluru, a cash-and-carry store of about 2,000 sq. metres for commercial buyers.
“I still remember, we celebrated when we had 4,000 customers. Till 2013, we did not have a licence to sell it (directly) to the customer,” he says. Their latest store opened in Belagavi, Karnataka, this year.
Spending 15 years in a single company is fairly unusual these days. He credits that to Decathlon’s strong “people centricity”, autonomy at work, local decision-making, flat organisational structure and lack of hierarchy. Working across different divisions within the company helped keep the monotony away.
“When you play sport together, for instance, there is no hierarchy anyway. But three things keep me here: love for sport, the product and the people. It taught me, not only as a professional but as a person also, to be humble. Legs on the ground, heads in the sky.”
“There will be different opinions. But there is a difference between confrontation and bitterness. Confrontation is normal because everybody is strong on their approach and conception. But what I have had over the last 15 years is that every Monday morning, I drive to work with the feeling—‘let’s go and do something well today’.”
He is particularly proud of the work he did on e-commerce, when he joined the division around 2018. When he started, Chatterjee says, their business in e-commerce was ₹27 crore. As he worked on building the technology, product and data while simultaneously continuing to manage logistics, the growth was rapid, reaching more than ₹600 crore in e-commerce today.
India’s expanding sports and outdoors culture
Decathlon’s spread is also owed to the overall growth in sport and outdoor activities in the country. The pandemic, for instance, gave a huge impetus to cycling—an appropriately socially distant outdoor group activity for that time—and Decathlon has a large inventory for bicycles.
Few brands here make hiking and trekking gear, which is one of Decathlon’s specialties. With competitively priced products, large spaces, an easy return policy, Decathlon also became a convenient stop for someone who was getting into a sport and did not wish to spend large amounts initially on gear.
When he started at the company, Chatterjee says that data from internal research found that only 5% of Indians played some sort of sport. That figure today is 12%. It’s the reason India’s sports goods manufacturing, valued at $6.7 billion, is projected to reach $11 billion by 2030, according to a 2025 KPMG report, Sportlight—The Business of Sports.
Decathlon, in 2025 alone, supported over 170 running events across India that include over 200,000 runners, through training workshops, community runs and in-store experiences. This was the reflection of a larger national trend that they discovered—India now hosts over 1,600 organised running events annually, with registered runners growing two-and-a-half times between 2019 and 2025.
In between sips of his tea, Chatterjee excitedly lays out their future plans, of doubling growth in the next five years with an investment of €100 million. The investment would go into real estate expansion, product conception, production, technology enhancement and supply chain. The number of stores will ramp up to 200, supported by digital expansion, bigger supplier portfolios, and a boost for made-in-India. “Plus, we want amazing customer experience, because we are obsessed about that,” he adds, before quickly checking on the time.
Chatterjee says that he is particular about not opening his laptop on weekends. In many ways, he says he is still that boy from Bengal, who would happily spend his afternoons fishing in the neighbourhood pond. In the absence of such idyllic settings, he chooses to spend his free time pottering about his plants in his garden in Bengaluru, scooting off occasionally on his bike to get vermicompost or other such requirements.
His holidays, therefore, cannot be in a city. For example, he could not go to Hong Kong for a holiday. “But if there is a good mountain there or a hike, that could work,” he says, grinning.
Twice a year, he makes sure to go back to his hometown. “Those times are unique. That never came out from my DNA. I live a normal life, stay grounded, focus on the essentials.”
He does not seek validation from society or “get hijacked by social media. We are not film stars or politicians,” he says. “We are just ordinary people trying to do extraordinary jobs.”
Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.